Google Nexus 7 Tablet Announced

Google Joins The Tablet Battle

As was widely rumored, Google showed a 7" tablet at Google I/O earlier today. The search giant announced the Nexus 7, a new tablet device similar in size (7") and price ($199) to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The new tablet, developed jointly with hardware maker Asus, will make it easy to access media available on the Google Play service, just as the Kindle Fire can easily access books, movies and other content available at Amazon. The Nexus 7 is available for order now and will ship next month.


One very interesting component of the Nexus 7 is NFC (Near Field Communications) hardware. This might make a variety of new applications possible, from exchanging data easily among NFC-equipped Android devices to financial applications with vendors equipped to take payments through NFC approaches.

After taking on Amazon with the Nexus 7, Google took on Apple with another device, called Nexus Q. The Nexus Q will compete with Apple TV (and Roku) boxes, and will stream content from Google Play and YouTube to be played through televisions and/or standalone speakers.

As they did with the Nexus One phone back in 2010, Google may be introducing their own hardware in order to launch some of their new capabilities in the way that works best for them. That is, these new Nexus products may be reference implementations so that other equipment manufacturers will have a head start on how to build future Android devices that leverage the latest "Jelly Bean" version of the operating system, and that will match and then build on capabilities of new hardware such as NFC.

Are either of these new Google devices on your shopping list? How will they serve your needs better than, say, a Kindle Fire or an Apple TV? Leave a comment and let us know.

Links:

• https://developers.google.com/events/io/
• https://play.google.com/
• http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Fire-Amazon-Tablet/dp/B0051VVOB2
• http://www.asus.com/
• http://www.apple.com/appletv/
• http://www.roku.com/

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